The Ripple Effect: Why Mindset, Mood & Energy Is So Important For Leaders
I’ve worked with many brilliant & smart people. Some have had empowering positive faith-based mindsets and others have leaned more towards what we would label as a negative fear-based mindset.
When times are tough positive mindsets focus on solutions, learning, growth, identifying paths forward, searching for unseen opportunities & taking 100% responsibility.
When times are tough negative mindsets focus on complaining, blaming, excuses and shirking responsibility.
And here’s the thing about tough times… They always come. No matter what company, what industry, what economy.
The same goes for family life & life in general. Tough times visit every aspect of human endeavor.
So if we know that tough times are coming what can we do…?
We must continuously foster the right mindset & take 100% responsibility. As the saying goes:
““When the going gets tough, the tough get going.””
In his awesome book, The Happiness Advantage, author Shawn Achor shares a scientific study that demonstrate that within 2-minutes of meeting three strangers will take on the emotions of the most expressive person in the room. He also details how companies will take on the general mindset of the leadership team. These phenomenons are called “emotional contagion” & “mindset contagion.”
This can be seen in companies across the world and surely you can see this in your own working career whether you’ve worked for the same company or many companies. Leadership sets the tone and the employees follow suit. This trickle down effect doesn’t only come from the CEO of a company. It holds true for all levels of leadership.
Chances are that at some point in your career you’ve had a boss who was either super positive or super negative and within minutes of the work day’s meeting everyone else in the room takes on the emotional attitude & mindset of the leader. I’ve seen this in my work plenty of times, both the positive & the negative.
Furthermore, it doesn’t even have to be a team meeting. It could be a one-on-one meeting or a casual interaction with a colleague or boss.
I’ve even seen it happen over phone conferences & video conferences — you don’t even have to physically be in the room. Virtually being in the room has just as much transference power.
Plus, I’ve also experienced it through individual & group emails, text messages, as well as Slack group channels & Slack direct messages. [Slack is the instant-messaging platform my company & many others use.]
At one point in my past career I had a boss who was in a negative emotional & mental mindset a majority of the time during our one-on-one meetings. His talk track was filled with fear— how we couldn’t do this or that, how others are holding him/us back, talking shit, sharing all the drama among the company leadership, lamenting about how the sky is falling and we’re all doomed, etc.
I almost never left one of those meetings in a positive mood and then when I went back to the rest of my work I was left feeling confused, uninspired, unmotivated, & often times somewhat fearful myself.
It literally got the point where I had to have a heart-to-heart talk with him about the effect he was having on me and the rest of the team.
It hurts me to even admit this personal story for two reasons: (1) if he reads this he will likely know who I am speaking of and I don’t like to openly call people out even if I’m keeping them anonymous & (2) I consider myself to have an incredibly strong inner fortitude and the fact that someone else was able to mess with my mental/emotional state is vexing.
The saddest part for me was I had plenty of conversations with this same boss when he was in a positive mental & emotional state and he was super inspiring which then left me in an empowered state where I was super inspired & motivated at work.
Fortunately, this same boss had a habit of always leading our team meetings with an inspirational positive mindset, but for whatever reason the darkness would creep into some of his one-on-ones. I hope that if he does read this it is the catalyst for him to always feed the faith & bring positivity to all of his leadership activities whether it be in a group setting or during a casual or formal one-on-one interaction with a direct report.
Now let me contrast this with two other bosses that I’ve had, both of which were super positive no matter what the situation. It didn’t matter if we just had a big win or a big setback at the company.
At a group leadership level when we just had a big win these two company leaders would harness that momentum in a way that empowered myself & everyone to keep on building towards higher heights.
And when we just had a setback, even a major setback, they would acknowledge the challenge, take 100% responsibility, and then use it as leverage to foster growth, increase teamwork, explore new avenues, change directions, build new systems, and ultimately turn whatever the challenge was into an opportunity.
Individually, during both formal & informal one-on-one meetings in-person, on the phone, and even during our email/text/slack interactions these two individual leaders have never ended a meeting or ended an interaction without leaving me feeling more inspired, more enthused, more motivated & more grateful for the incredible work I get to do at Oh My Green.
I’m grateful for them every week because I get to share the positive energy we co-create during our interactions with my coworkers, customers & clients.
On top of that I take this same positive energy back home. The mental emotional buck doesn’t stop with work. So not only is your boss greatly influencing your attitude & mood at work, we are then taking that same energy home and sharing it with our family, friends, & community.
You’ve surely seen this in your family life growing up. If Mom or Dad are grumpy it’s not long before the whole household is grumpy. Or if Mom or Dad just had a big win and they come home super enthused the positive energy is picked up by the rest of the family.
If you’re a parent now or even just in relationship, if you really take a step back & watch, you will see how the strongest mood & mental/emotional state, whether positive or negative, is and always will be the anchor pulling others towards that particular energetic baseline.
In his book, Achor also shares a theory that stipulates that there are nearly 1000 people within three degrees of most of us. So when we pair “emotional contagion” & “mindset contagion” with this theory we get a Ripple Effect.
Good or bad vibes ripple outward from those who are in positions of leadership and from those who are strongly emotionally expressive.
This is why when you are in a position of leadership it is your responsibility to exude an emotional state and mindset that is empowering to others—you’re not only affecting the people you’re interacting with, you’re affecting at least 3-degrees out & touching up to a 1000 or more lives.
I’d venture to say that with the rise of social media many of us can touch tens of thousands or even hundreds or millions of people with the content we share on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, & YouTube.
So when you have leaders at work who bring positivity & an empowering mindset irregardless of the current situations, markets, etc. it is a tremendous advantage for life & work. And it becomes a virtuous circle that just keeps on giving.
We all spend a majority of our waking hours deeply involved with work each week. So in reality the energetic tone of leadership at work is CRUCIAL to a life well-lived.
If you are a leader you must recognize the responsibility that you have to be a great positive life-affirming steward for your team—you are directly influencing the BIGGEST time commitment of a person’s life!
And if you are in a toxic workplace and have a boss or leader with a negative attitude & mindset you should seek employment in a different department or a different company if it’s coming from the top down and you can’t escape it no matter what department you switch to.
No matter how mentally & emotionally strong & happy you are, negative leadership will eventually bring you down if it hasn’t already.
This is YOUR LIFE & YOUR HAPPINESS we are talking about here so literally take it like your life depends on it (because it does). Stress is the top factor contributing to human disease & unhappiness.
And it isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it thing. We must always work diligently & proactively to design a life worth truly living for. No one is going to serve it up to us on a silver platter. It’s our responsibility to create the work/life we want to live. We can’t change other people, but we can change ourself & our work/life.
I’ll wrap this up with a short parable about two wolves that are destined to fight each other in an ancient ceremony. The son of the caretaker of the wolves asks his father “Which wolf will win the fight?”
The father responded, “That’s easy, the one I feed more.”
Ultimately, happiness & mindset is a choice and a practice. Every day we must choose which wolf we are going to feed. Every day we have an opportunity and a choice of whether we will practice bringing positivity/happiness to our own life and the life of others OR whether we will bring negativity, fear & darkness.
The truth is we are all leaders in some or many aspects of our life. And we all have great power. What we do with that power is so incredibly important that we must not take it for granted. As Spider Man’s uncle said:
““With great power comes great responsibility.””
So when you go to work today who will you be? Are you going to bring others down? Or will you be the Lighthouse shining bright no matter whether the ocean is calm & idyllic or whether it’s raging & stormy?
I don’t know about you but I’m gonna BURN BRIGHT while screaming out “YEEHAW!!” regardless of the ever-changing weather!
Your Life Alchemist,
Justin David Carl
P.S. For those who know me well or follow my Instagram Stories one of the big reasons I am constantly screaming out “YEEHAW!!!” is because it causes a Ripple Effect of Happiness & induces an all-around sense of “LIFE/WORK IS SERIOUSLY SO AWESOME!” It causes laughter & joy and most of my friends and colleagues Yeehaw me right back during just about every encounter we have—whether in person or through text, Slack, email, phone calls, etc. Many people have personally told me that my ridiculous yeehawing makes them happy. This in turn along with the ongoing call-and-response makes me ridiculously happy which makes me want to yeehaw even more—it’s a never-ending self-perpetuating virtuous circle of ridiculous happiness! YEEHAWWWW!!!
Resources:
The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor - An awesome book that I think everyone who works in any organization should read. Backed by research.
Mindset by Carol Dweck - Another awesome book that I think every leader, parent, & person should read. Also backed by reserarch.
The Joy of Purposeful Work - A short article I wrote about the importance of having a personal mission & how this integral to your happiness at work & in life.
Optimizing Life - This is an article that dives deeper into how you can strategically design your life to feed the right wolf (input equals output).
Title Photo: Isiah Gibson
Always more Empowering content on my Instagram:
